Apple to announce new Final Cut Studio on April 12, pushes sponsors out of event

Apple is allegedly requiring sponsors of an April 12 meetup of Final Cut Pro professionals to cancel their presentations in order to reserve the stage time necessary for an official announcement of the next version of Final Cut Pro, a new report claims.

After rumors emerged on Tuesday that Apple would announce the next version of its professional video editing software at the FCP User Group SuperMeet, a side event of the annual National Association of Broadcasters tradeshow taking place on April 12 in Las Vegas, ProVideo Coalition's Steve Hullfish confirmed with several sponsors of the event that they had backed out of stage time in response to Apple's demands.

Cinematographer Philip Bloom, who had been invited to present at the event by Canon, told Hullfish that Canon had canceled his appearance after being told on Monday that Apple has demanded "all "lecturn" or stage time exclusively."

Avid's sponsorship and a keynote featuring director Kevin Smith have also been canceled. "Apple doesn't want anyone to have stage time but them," Avid was reported as saying.

Several other sponsors of the Supermeet told Hullfish that "something was happening," though they declined to give further details.

"I cant imagine any news that would warrant this kind of take-over other than to announce and demonstrate the next full version of Final Cut Pro and possibly an entirely newly designed FCS4," Hullfish wrote.

According to the report, sponsors who were not using presenters may continue to sponsor the event, but will not be appearing on the stage.

In February, producer, director and editor Larry Jordan wrote on his blog that Apple had invited a small group of film industry professionals to preview the upcoming update to Final Cut Pro. Jordan acknowledged that he was bound by a non-disclosure agreement, while admitting that the meeting had happened and the update was "a jaw-dropper."

Earlier reports had suggested that the biggest overhaul yet for Final Cut Pro would arrive this spring with "dramatic and ambitious" changes focused on professional users.

After AppleInsider reported last year that Apple was scaling down Final Cut Studio for the prosumer market, Apple quickly responded stating, "Final Cut Pro is the first choice for professional video editors and weve never been more excited about its future. The next version of Final Cut is going to be awesome and our pro customers are going to love it."

Apple has reportedly experienced delays because of development setbacks caused by "fundamental differences of opinion" over the ideal interface for Final Cut Studio. As a result, the update, which was originally slated for a 2010 launch, was pushed back to a spring 2011 release.

The last major update to Final Cut Studio came in July 2009, with more than 100 new features and a $300 price reduction.

-- as an additional display
-- as a multitouch input device
-- as a control surface

I think that would be cool too - it is quite tiresome to click back and forth between the timeline, tools, file browser, etc. Although if that were true, I think iMovie for iPad would have turned out better (since Apple does cross-pollinate ideas). I've hard that it's just mediocre, especially in comparison to the awesome GarageBand app.

Either way, I'm looking forward to it - the Final Cut UI is not up to Apple standards. Too bad I just finished doing a big project for a friend a week ago

-- as an additional display
-- as a multitouch input device
-- as a control surface

I have a feeling your right, and those would be awesome changes. But for me its this:

1. Improved render and transcoding speeds by use of GPU.
2. Stability Improvements stemming from less strict interpretations of frame rate/ resolution ect.

And my dream improvement? When you transcode to 422, it automatically creates a proxy duplicate that can be edited in real time on ipad, whose renders are done automatically by the workstation over the air.

-- as an additional display
-- as a multitouch input device
-- as a control surface

I can definitely see a team sitting around a conference table discussing the latest changes to a project and working in an interactive discussion leverage the iPad to do what you say and much more where they can be remote and discussing development while storing all their change requirements via WebDAV and then later for retrieval as they work at a workstation to input the changes and release their next test stage for review. Repeat until ready to release.

I have a feeling your right, and those would be awesome changes. But for me its this:

1. Improved render and transcoding speeds by use of GPU.
2. Stability Improvements stemming from less strict interpretations of frame rate/ resolution ect.

And my dream improvement? When you transcode to 422, it automatically creates a proxy duplicate that can be edited in real time on ipad, whose renders are done automatically by the workstation over the air.

Yeah -- the render is gonna' come from Cocoa, 64 bit, OpenCL, GCD and exploitation of the hardware -- those are minimum requirements.

iOS 4.3 has all the Prores codecs and APIs...

I keep thinking that Apple will announce 1 or 2 devices to support Final cut:

1) a large screen display / multitouch tablet

2) a server

BTW, when I started fooling around with Motion -- I was amazed and pleasantly pleased for the [pseudo] lack of need to render.

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There are many things we all want to see changed or added. GPU acceleration with better use of multi-cores is probably a given. 64 bit seems likely too. Also the ability to edit H264 natively from Canon DSLRs would be a boon. Adobe did a great job with this in Premiere so Apple needs to do the same or better. Smaller things like a complete redo of the nightmarish setting menus. It is really ridiculous to see that list of sequence presets and capture presets in Audio/Video Settings. There has to be a better way to handle this.

We don't know that Apple did. Avid's spokesperson implied it but for all we know Apple called and asked about stage time and it was the NAB that offered them whatever they needed and then called and told the other folks that they were being cut from the stage, shifted to a smaller stage etc

We don't know that Apple did. Avid's spokesperson implied it but for all we know Apple called and asked about stage time and it was the NAB that offered them whatever they needed and then called and told the other folks that they were being cut from the stage, shifted to a smaller stage etc

True, we don't know at this point. But here's the problem: It SOUNDS like something Apple would do.

-- as an additional display
-- as a multitouch input device
-- as a control surface

I agree. I have even gone further in the past and suggested one reason I see for iOS features being added to OS X is for FCPro. The ability to have a something like a touch screen version of an ACD 30" laying down at a 15° angle running OS X with a touch interfaced version of FCPro would be a Star Trek moment. All the power of OS X plus the interface abilities of both OS X and iOS ... dare I say this ... at my fingertips!

From Apple ][ - to new Mac Pro I've owned them all.Long on AAPL so biased"Google doesn't sell you anything, Google just sells you!"

The reason Avid was probably originally scheduled to appear is because they are also the owners of ProTools. And many of us Final Cut editors also use ProTools as part of our jobs.

Great point... which makes me wonder when Apple is going to look at similar issues with Logic Studio for sound. I would dearly love having the iPad as a flexible control surface for both the DAW and soft synths, FX, etc.

People often confuse 'bloated' with 'a lot of features'. It's all about how, when and where you present these features.

I would personally like to see FCP use context menus.
When you click on a clip or sequence you get options like 'go into detail mode' (hopefully a better term). It then changes to a more After Effects kind of mode where you can use the eraser to remove cables in the video (it will remove the cables in other frames), do 2d and 3d tracking and so on. And a button that switches to color correction mode. Motion-esque / AE-esque. Press 'x' to go back to edit mode.

Nothing bloated about that, much better than switching apps dealing with there own little rules and quirks. Copying almost-the-same-behavior to 5 apps IS bloated.

Same thing goes for sound files; clicking a button when selecting a sound sequence or 'conposition' switches to audio edit mode within FCP, or optionally send ProTools/GarageBand or whatever.

I think that would be cool too - it is quite tiresome to click back and forth between the timeline, tools, file browser, etc. Although if that were true, I think iMovie for iPad would have turned out better (since Apple does cross-pollinate ideas). I've hard that it's just mediocre, especially in comparison to the awesome GarageBand app.

Either way, I'm looking forward to it - the Final Cut UI is not up to Apple standards. Too bad I just finished doing a big project for a friend a week ago

Throw Aperture in that boat, I find it incredibly clunky compared to iPhoto, though much better than lightroom.